We performed a comparison between Cisco Secure Firewall and Fortinet Fortigate based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Based on the parameters we compared, Fortinet Fortigate comes out on top. Its ease of deployment combined with its solid set of features and excellent service and support ratings make it a more desirable solution than Cisco Secure Firewall.
"It has definitely improved our organization. It gives us remote connectivity, helps workers connect remotely, and also gives us good connectivity to our other branches."
"All the rules are secure and we haven't had a significant malware attack in the five years that we've been using ASA Firewall. It has been a tremendous improvement for our network. However, I can't quantify the benefits in monetary terms."
"The high-availability features, the VPN and the IPSec, are our top three features."
"We have not had to deal with stability issues."
"Its ability to discover attacks is a valuable feature. All of the other features that have to do with security are good."
"The Adversity Malware Protection (AMP) feature is the most valuable. It is also very easy to use. Every technical user can operate this solution without any difficulty. The dashboard of Cisco Firepower has every tool that a security operator needs. You can find every resource that you need to operate through this dashboard."
"Cisco's technical support is the best and that's why everybody implements their products."
"One of the nice things about Firepower is that you can set it to discover the environment. If that is happening, then Firepower is learning about every device, software operating system, and application running inside or across your environment. Then, you can leverage the discovery intelligence to get Firepower to select the most appropriate intrusion prevention rules to use for your environment rather than picking one of the base policies that might have 50,000 IPS rules in it, which can put a lot of overhead on your firewall. If you choose the recommendations, as long as you update them regularly, you might be able to get your rule set down to only 1,000 or 1,500, which is a significant reduction in a base rule set. This means that the firewall will give you better performance because there are less rules being checked unnecessarily. That is really useful."
"The email protection and VPN features are the most valuable."
"There are great templates, so you don't have to customize them if you don't want to. You do have the option to custom create some folders and some reports, however, with what is there, you don't really need to go through extra effort, as they already give you a lot of predefined views of reports and so forth."
"Using this product makes the VPN seamless and almost invisible to me in the sense that I don't have to think about it."
"The most valuable feature of Fortinet FortiGate is security. They are known for efficiency and are on the top of Gartner Quadrant reviews. Fortinet FortiGate has an easy-to-use platform with a good graphical interface. The configuration is simple and the solution provides an overall good layer of security."
"In terms of security, we have not experienced any security flaws or loopholes, and it has proven to be quite stable."
"The initial setup is straightforward."
"The web filtering feature and the intrusion protection system are the most valuable. It is a resilient appliance. I never had an issue with it in terms of any security breaches."
"FortiGate firewalls are user-friendly, and I like the security profiling features."
"This is an older product and has reached end-of-life."
"We cannot have virtual domains, which we can create with FortiGate. This is something they should add in the future. Additionally, there is a connection limit and the FMC could improve."
"MSSP oriented interface: I would like a single console which would allow me to manage settings creating consistency across all customers."
"The main problem we have is that things work okay until we upgrade the firmware, at which point, everything changes, and the net stops working."
"Multiple WAN connections: Even though you can implement more than one interface to outside connections, it is lacking on load balances, etc."
"Licensing is complex, and I'd like it to be simplified. This is an area for improvement."
"The dashboard can be improved."
"The initial setup could be simplified, as it can be complex for new users."
"We had some issues in the beginning while setting it up, but after doing the firmware update, it is working fine."
"The price of FortiGate should be reduced because there are some other leading products that are cheaper."
"I think the only issue that needs improvement is the interface."
"There can be more security in hybrid implementations. When a customer has a hybrid environment where some parts are in the cloud, we need a consistent security solution for such scenarios."
"The user interface could be improved to make it less confusing and easier to set up."
"The platform's interface could improve."
"We had a minor problem where there was a major system upgrade on the hardware platfrom and the Mac client was not available as soon as it might have been. The PC client was available immediately, but we had to wait a month or so, before there was a mac client. I was slightly irritated that it was not ready on time, but it was eventually resolved."
"The scalability could be better."
Cisco Secure Firewall is ranked 4th in Firewalls with 404 reviews while Fortinet FortiGate is ranked 2nd in Firewalls with 306 reviews. Cisco Secure Firewall is rated 8.2, while Fortinet FortiGate is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Cisco Secure Firewall writes "Highlights and helps us catch Zero-day vulnerabilities traveling across our network". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Fortinet FortiGate writes "It's a reliable solution that's easy to install and cheaper than competitors ". Cisco Secure Firewall is most compared with Palo Alto Networks WildFire, Netgate pfSense, Meraki MX, Sophos XG and Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls, whereas Fortinet FortiGate is most compared with Sophos XG, Netgate pfSense, Meraki MX, WatchGuard Firebox and Check Point NGFW. See our Cisco Secure Firewall vs. Fortinet FortiGate report.
See our list of best Firewalls vendors.
We monitor all Firewalls reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.